CIVILIZATION AXD THE MACHINE PROCESS 351
tilarly among those classes whose life is closely regulated by the machine technology ; and that the discipline of this machine technology is peculiarly designed to inculcate such iconoclastic habits of thought as come to a head in the socialistic bias. Socialism, in so far as the term means the subversion of the economic foundations of modem culture, occurs only sporadically and dubiously outside the limits, in time and space, of the discipline of the machine technology. While among those classes whose everyday life schools them to do their habitual serious thinking in terms of material cause and effect, the preconceptions of ownership are apparently becoming obsolescent through disuse and through supersessign by other methods of apprehending things.'
1 If this account of tbe clus limitation of the oodaliBt Um ia accepted. It has an immediate bearing upon a qnwtion which is latterly engaging the attention of the adTOCatea of socialism. The queetioD ia aa to the part played by propertyless office employees and by the businesB men whom the modem coDsolidationB of biuinen reduce to the position of salaried managers and superinteDdentB. With a faith prompted by their own hopes rather than by observed tads or by the logic of events, the spokesmen for socialism are strongly inclined to claim tbis ■' bosiness proletariat " as a contingent which the ooaise at economic development la bound to throw into tbe socialist camp. Ttie (acts do not in any appreciable degree countenance anch an expeclaUon. The unptopertled classes employed in business do not take to socialistic vagaries with such alacrity as should inspire a conSdent hope In the advocates of socialism